Baby and Other Stories On Sale Now
"Reading Baby & Other Stories is like being attacked by a rabid dog—and feeling grateful for it. This is some of the rawest and most urgent writing I can remember encountering."
—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
The short stories in her debut collection are subversive portraits of the modern American family. From a husband who traces his internal crisis to witnessing his wife giving birth, to a mother who forces her young son on a rainy walk through a cemetery as she contemplates the detritus of her marriage, Bomer's characters are hauntingly familiar. Their fear and rage, their failures and desires are our own.
Praise for Baby & Other Stories
"Reading Baby & Other Stories is like being attacked by a rabid dog—and feeling grateful for it. This is some of the rawest and most urgent writing I can remember encountering."
—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
"Dysfunctional doesn't begin to describe the marriages in this brilliant, brutally raw debut collection."
—O Magazine
"In 10 raw and angry stories, Bomer flays the idea of happy little families.... This lacerating take on marriage and motherhood is not one to share with the Mommy and Me group."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"If Bomer's harsh portrayal of modern parenting and marriage were water, it would be transparent, unflecked, jagged ice.... She lands firmly between Mary Gaitskill's articulate, unflinching anhedonia and Kathy Acker.... Amy Hempel with a twist of Grace Paley. Baby is punk rock for the roundly domesticated."
—Bookforum
"Words like 'tough' and 'honest' don't quite do justice to the fiction of Paula Bomer. The real housewives of Bomerworld break themselves and break your heart and yet never completely lose their soulful dignity."
—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask